In a much-quoted section of his Ecclesiastical History, Ordericus Vitalis criticised Henry I because ‘he ennobled others of base stock who had served him well, raised them, so to say, from the dust, and heaping all kinds of favours on them, stationed them above earls and famous castellans’. This phenomenon was not confined to the twelfth century. Both John and Henry III promoted obscure men, often aliens, to the highest ranks in their realms.

What happened to the children of these ‘new men’ when the high position their fathers achieved was not passed on in full? There is no obvious historiography that illuminates this issue and that of paternal reputation. For instance, although David Carpenter, Peter Coss, Anne Polden and Nigel Saul have written about the problems of maintaining knightly status, the examples in this paper are not exemplars to be used in a discussion of whether there was a crisis of the knightly class in the thirteenth century. The paper is about the legacy of the sons of men of comital rank who did not benefit from their father's achievements. The lives of Thomas de Bréauté and Hugh de Plessis, two relatively obscure thirteenth-century Oxfordshire knights, whose fathers had very remarkable careers, illustrate what could happen to such men. There are only a few possible comparators in the thirteenth century. Having had their pater familias killed at Evesham with one of his sons, the Montforts never regained the earldom of Leicester and the surviving sons died in exile.